32 is a bit much

There are 32 bowl games for college football. By my math, that's 64 teams. Virtually the same as the number for college basketball. I say that's overkill. I know people enjoy watching football. But a bowl game is essentially like a playoff game. Making the playoffs should be relatively hard. Since there are 120 teams in D1 football, over half of them make the "playoffs". This is a frequent problem with say the NBA or NHL playoffs with 16 teams out of 30, but those formats are somewhat different and are more ingrained as a playoff structure, whilst some of these bowls are relatively new. For comparison, if there are 65 teams making the playoffs for college basketball, out of 328, then statistically there should be 24 teams in bowl games. Accepting the consolation NIT tournament as a playoff, that improves the number to 36. 18 bowl games would be manageable and we would have more legitimate representatives. For example: Memphis vs Florida Atlantic? Southern Miss? And so on. About half the teams that are in bowl games did little more than play 6 or 7 cupcakes to get there and did almost nothing on a national scale to deserve attention by playing a game after the season ended, generally losing to the only good team they played all year, plus some conference opponents.

I'm not concerned with the whole 'we need a playoff in college football'. What we need is a more exclusive bowl system. Then we can talk about a playoff between the most elite teams. I personally like the idea of having the bowls first and having the teams reseeded and then having a second round between the top teams who survived those games. That seems like a better plan than letting OSU play LSU without qualification.